BadBadNotGood, a Toronto jazz trio more likely to cover Tyler the Creator than Thelonious Monk, precede tonight’s Wu-Tang clansman collaboration with a short set of their own. Fifteen minutes of unforgiving heavy fusion performed to a roomful of Wu-maniacs awaiting the coming of Ghostface Killah, it should go down as well as Derek Smalls’s Jazz Odyssey. Instead, hollers and whoops greet every solo – although the guest saxophonist’s Ayler-esque ululations do send many to the bar.
It’s Ghostface, however, who receives the true hero’s welcome. A lyrical heavyweight, he’s been the most prolific Wu outside the Clan, with a slew of esteemed solo albums. BadBadNotGood wrote and performed the music on his latest, Sour Soul, and it’s both a mystery and a missed opportunity that only Ray Gun – where the Canadians conjure the eerie funk of prime Wu-Tang, and Ghostface responds in kind – is performed tonight.
Instead, the set draws almost entirely from Ghostface’s back pages – a frenetic 45 minutes of work for BadBadNotGood, re-creating the licks and grooves sampled for the original tracks. Impersonating the Love Unlimited Orchestra one moment and repeating a bar from Bob James’s Nautilus for a pulverising Daytona 500 the next, they’re faultless, their razor-edged chops keeping the grooves edgy, drummer Alexander Sowinski’s snare like a funky machine-gun.
Ghostface, meanwhile, proves an unabashed showman. For Protect Ya Neck, he plucks a pair of amateur MCs from the crowd to deliver verses originally cut by Method Man and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, promising the crowd they “can boo them if they fuck up”. He even croons along to covers of the Jackson 5’s I Want You Back and the Isley Brothers’ Footsteps in the Dark, though his skills are clearly put to better use on Wu favourites such as Shimmy Shimmy Ya, Nutmeg and the psychedelic skronk-rap of the closing 4th Chamber, slipping genius twists of language and rhythm into his flow, and never sounding anything less than completely in control.
Tonight, then, is premium crowd-pleasing nostalgia, a bask in the talent of the Wu’s sharpest MC, lent extra bite by the trio’s virtuoso funk – though a couple more Sour Soul tracks could’ve proven the salient fact that, unlike some of his bandmates, Ghostface’s glory days aren’t over yet.
• At the Parklife festival, Heaton Park, Manchester, 7 June. Box office: 0844 888 9991.
